The Wall Is in Trump’s Head: Immigration, National Sovereignty, and America’s Borders

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks about tax reform in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on October 11, 2017.
Joshua Roberts/Reuters

Blog Post

Blog posts represent the views of CFR fellows and staff and not those of CFR, which takes no institutional positions.

In an op-ed recently published in The Hill, I examine the inconvenient truths that confront President Trump’s border wall proposal.

President Trump’s termination of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) last month showed callous disregard for innocents caught in the broken U.S. immigration system. On Sunday, he doubled down. The president turned those same “dreamers” into bargaining chips, by conditioning any legislative deal on their fate to Democratic agreement to a set of hard line proposals. These include constructing his long promised border wall, hiring 10,000 more immigration agents, and cracking down on “sanctuary cities.”